The first comet of 2022 was discovered by a Hungarian astronomer

Believe it or not, comet hunting is a really serious sport among astronomers, and being able to spot the first comet of the New Year is a pretty big deal.

In 2022, the honour of spotting the year’s first comet goes to a Hungarian astronomer named Krisztián Sárneczky, who is the third-ever Hungarian astronomer to have a comet named after them.

Sárneczky, the astronomer at the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, spotted the comet in the early hours of January 2 with the help of the 60 cm Schmidt telescope of the Piszkéstető Observatory, RTL reports.

The Hungarian astronomer had managed to take three photos with 104 seconds of exposure; he concluded from them that what he discovered was a so far unknown, small comet.

The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams had reported the following: “Krisztián Sárneczky, Konkoly Observatory, reports the discovery of a fast-moving comet during a visual inspection of three stacked 104-s unfiltered CCD survey images.”

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“The object shows a compact inner region (condensed false nucleus) about 8″ x 10″ in diameter and a fan-shaped tail at least 20″ long in a westward direction. On a 312-s stacked image, there is a faint outer diffuse coma about 40″ in diameter, with two jets in p.a. 230 and 350 deg.”